We hear this over and over and over again. Every single time a male actor, athlete, musician, artist, politician, chef (and the list goes on) are alleged to be perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence and abuse, the refrain is “oh, everyone knew”.

The original plan of Everyone Knew was to list only those men for whom allegations had become public in the immediate aftermath of Rowan Farrow’s expose of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes. However, it soon became clear that it was a false division. Part of the reason for including men like Charlie Chaplin and Roman Polanski, whose crimes go back decades, is to show just how ubiquitous this level of entitlement is and just how many men are perpetrators – men who did not suddenly become perpetrators when named in the press. We talk about Harvey Weinstein as though it was a watershed point. The simple truth is the complete opposite. These ‘watershed’ moments are continuous and constant. We need to keep pushing back on the silencing of women and children. And, we need to stop pretending that naming Weinstein will change everything. We have been here before and it hasn’t. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t fight back. We must. Otherwise the abuse will still continue – unnamed because we already ‘solved’ it.

Over the years, feminist activists and journalists have campaigned for boycotts of celebrity men with a history of violence against women and girls. The sheer number of allegations and the multiple perpetrators named in the past month make it difficult to keep track. This is why Everyone Knew was born. It will be a database of convicted perpetrators, as well as naming men who are alleged to be perpetrators. You can find the list here; it is not complete and may never be as many predators will continue to use the their money and their power to silence victims. I have also built sub-categories of employment and industry to show that this is more than just ‘Hollywood’ or some rogue US senators.

You can follow us at @EveryoneKnew17 & #EveryoneKnew

As with many feminist projects, I created this database without external financial support. If you can afford to donate £1 to help continue this project, I would be incredibly grateful.

Sisters Uncut are a great example of grassroots feminist activism. Their protest at the premier of the film Suffrage helped raise awareness of the consequences of the decimation of specialist support services for women. However, their campaign is specifically about the importance of specialist domestic violence services, which is why I was disappointed to read a piece in the Independent by a member which uses the term domestic violence and violence against women interchangeably.

It is absolutely true that Sylvia Walby’s research into the reality of violence against women in the UK demonstrates how the Crime Survey erases the experiences of women who experience domestic violence by capping the number of crimes that one person can report at 5. The Office for National Statistics insist the cap is necessary as

“otherwise the sheer number of crimes committed by perpetrators against the same individual would skew the rest of the statistics.”

Recording the frequency of incidents of physical, emotional, psychological or sexual violence experienced by an individual would cause a surge in crime statistics, but it doesn’t ‘defy’ statistics as Sisters Uncut suggests. It would make clear the consistent failure of successive governments and police forces to deal with the issue. It would have long-term consequences on financing and would make women’s secondary status in political life obvious. The cap disproportionately impacts women and it specifically impacts women who experience the vast majority of domestic violence by erasing the sex of the perpetrator: who are overwhelmingly male. The decision to create a cap was not to make it easier for statisticians, but a clear policy of eliding the reality of all forms of violence against women and girls from public awareness.

The cap also functions to inflate the number of men who experience domestic violence by including incidences of retaliatory violence where a woman lashes out at the male partner who is physically harming her causing injury to his person.* The victim, therefore, becomes a perpetrator of domestic violence. In this case, the man’s one experience (caused by a woman defending herself) is given more credence than a woman who may have experienced 365 separate incidents of which only 5 count in official statistics. This is why the 1 in 6 men are victims of domestic violence is a misnomer. Conflating retaliatory violence with the pattern of coercive control that is domestic violence harms women as a class and makes it more difficult to campaign for specialist services for women. The cap makes domestic violence look ‘gender-neutral’.

It is not yet clear to me how the new criminal offence of coercive control will be recorded in these statistics. If each incident of coercive control is included, the crime statistics will be astronomical. It’s unlikely the media will address this issue appropriately since they have uniformly reported a drop in violent crime in the annual crime survey despite the fact that domestic and sexual violence and abuse are on the rise. Here the media colludes in creating a picture where only violence experienced by men constitutes real violence.

Removing the cap is essential to change public perceptions of domestic violence, however domestic violence does not equal violence against women and girls. It is one part of the continuum of violence against girls first formulated by Prof Liz Kelly in reference to her research on sexual violence. The theoretical construct of this continuum has since been expanded to include all forms of violence against women: domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, crimes in the name of ‘honour’, trafficking and more. Violence against women is any “violence that is directed at a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately”. As a radical feminist, I include pornography, prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation as part of the continuum.

So-called ‘austerity measures’ in the UK disproportionately impact women increasing women’s poverty (and that of their children). I believe this forms part of the continuum as denying women physical and emotional safety whilst financially penalising them for being born female are acts of state sanctioned violence in and of themselves and make women more vulnerable to other forms of male violence.

Sisters Uncut’s activism around the specific issue of domestic violence is essential, particularly making links to the cuts to legal aid, housing, refuges, healthcare, migrant women, poverty, and forcing women to facilitate unsafe contact between their children with their violent fathers through the family courts and social services. Using the term ‘violence against women’ interchangeably with domestic violence is problematic and it is important for Sisters Uncut to remain clear that their focus is solely on domestic violence and the importance of specialist services for women. After all, there are over 40 rape crisis centres across England and Wales at risk due to changes in funding. The national umbrella organisation Rape Crisis England and Wales appears to be receiving no government funding in 2016.** Specialist services for Black, Minority and Ethnic women are more at risk than other services. Cuts to ESOL and racist migration policies put BAME women at greater risk because of state-enforced dependence on violent spouses to remain in the UK with their children. Fighting specifically for domestic violence services can not come at the expense of other specialist services for women.

We need to be very clear when discussing the continuum of violence against women and girls and not use terms interchangeably. This particular article by Sisters Uncut is the most recent media piece I have seen making this mistake, but they are not the only one. The mainstream media consistently conflates terms, even in the very few well-written articles on the issues.

The political system is simply not designed to support women or recognise women’s specific vulnerabilities. which raises another issue with Sisters Uncut’s activism: membership. This is the definition for membership into the Sisters Uncut collective:

Our meetings should be inclusive and supportive spaces for all women (trans, intersex and cis), all those who experience oppression as women (including non-binary and gender non-conforming people) and all those who identify as women for the purpose of political organising. Self-definition is at the sole-discretion of that sister.

The women’s services that aren’t closing due to lack of funding, like Eaves, are being replaced by ‘neutral’ services. Local authorities are increasingly giving funding for refuges to homeless services and others that do not recognised the gendered reality of domestic violence. In at least one recent case, a woman fleeing an abusive male partner found herself housed in the same facility as the man because the local council did not recognise women’s specific vulnerabilities. There have been numerous reported cases of men claiming to be victims of domestic violence solely to be housed in the same facility as their former partner. There are a number of cases in Canada and the US where men claiming to be transwomen to gain access to women’s spaces where these self-defining transwomen have committed sexual assault and rape. None of these are aberrations. They are a direct consequence of the failure to recognise and differentiate between the hierarchical power relations of the social construction of gender and the material reality of sexed (and racialised) bodies.

Women cannot identify out of the biological reality of their body. Pregnancy, menstruation, and menopause exist. Women’s bodies exist. The preponderance of violence against women and girls is because women are constructed as less than men. Women due to the majority of caring because our culture links having a uterus to doing all the caring work. Men who engage in coercively controlling behaviours believe they have the right to do so – male entitlement is the basis of violence against women and girls. Our entire culture assumes men’s inalienable rights of sexual access to women’s bodies and their control over (re)productive labour. The judicial system, family, civil and criminal, still view women and children as the possessions of men. ‘Neutral’ policies on domestic and sexual violence and abuse are created to erase the identity of perpetrators: men. Ignoring the hierarchical social construction of gender makes it easier for local authorities to defund specialist women’s services. After all, if anyone can self-identify as male or female, the sex of the perpetrator and of the victims becomes irrelevant.

We will not end violence against women and girls by using gender- neutral language or by conflating one form of violence with the entire continuum. Claiming to be non-binary will not suddenly erase the inequalities in pay predicated on sex (or race or class). Women who do not conform to the gendered identity coercively assigned them at birth have always existed and are always punished – from the ‘witch’ trials to the corrective rape of lesbian women. This is not a new phenomenon and queer theory is responsible for erasing the history of women’s oppression by men. Obviously, this oppression is contextualised by historical location, cultural practice, as well as race, disability, sexuality and class, but the premise remains the same: women are treated as objects and possessions of men; men who believe they are entitled to control and harm women.

We need to eradicate the current white supremacist, capitalist-patriachy. We need to fight against austerity as its just the newest way to punish women for the crime of being born female, but we won’t do this unless we are clear in our language.

* See Michael P Johnson’s Typology of Domestic Violence

** The report into this was recently released and I have not yet had a chance to read it.

The main fact that the Mirror missed is that the vast majority of perpetrators of sexual violence are men. It is men who rape women, children and other men. The vast majority of perpetrators of sexual violence and assault are men. This is the reality and we need to talk about this clearly without falsifying data or ignoring information which makes us uncomfortable.

We also need to deconstruct the statistics that the Mirror has posted as fact:

1. 1 in 20 children have been sexually abused.

Media coverage tends to make parents wary of “stranger danger”, but the figures, released by the NSPCC, show that over 90% of children who have experienced sexual abuse were abused by someone they knew.

This statistic is widely used by the NSPCC who actually use the term “contact sexual abuse” and who do not make it clear on their website or research paper what they define as “contact sexual abuse” and “non-contact sexual abuse”. Separating the two types of sexual abuse does not demonstrate the reality of children’s experiences. It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of victims, whether by family members, members of the community, or ‘strangers’ are girls.

Unfortunately, the number of child victims is much higher with many children never disclosing and many people fundamentally misunderstanding what the term ‘child sexual abuse’ covers. We need to extend the definition to include children who are groomed and the reality of sexual harassment of children, including that of teenage girls by teenage boys with schools and adult men in public spaces.

We have written before of our concerns about the “stranger danger” advice and how it puts children at risk so we are glad that the Mirror has made this clear.

2. 18,916 sexual crimes against children under 16 were recorded in England and Wales in 2012/13. These include offences of sexual grooming, prostitution and pornography, rape and sexual assualt. They comprise 35% of all sexual crimes (53,540 in total) recorded in England and Wales in 2012/13.

The key word in this statement is “recorded”. We know that many children never disclose and many who do are simply not believed. We need to be clear when using this statistic that it does not represent the total of child victims but only those who become known to authorities (and that those authorities bother to believe the children).

3. Nearly one thousand teachers have been accused of sex with a student.

A BBC Newsbeat investigation found that between 2008 and 2013 almost one thousand teachers and school staffers were been suspended, disciplined or dismissed after being accused of having sex with a student. Around one in four are facing charges over the allegations.

As the figures were obtained via an FOI to 200 councils (though only 137 responded), they don’t include teachers and staffers at private schools or academies, so the overall number is likely to be higher.

This is an important statistic to include because frequently the abuse of students in schools gets ignored. But, these teachers have not been accused of “sex with a student”. Sex requires consent. Children are not legally competent to consent to sex and this includes 16 – 18 year olds in “relationships” with adults in a position of authority. We need to be clear that this is child sexual abuse. We also need to be clear that this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of sexual violence experienced by children within schools which includes everything from sexual harassment, unwanted touching, threats, posting images on social media and rape. Steubenville was not an isolated case. The sexual abuse of children within schools occurs daily and is frequently left unacknowledged or the victims blamed.

4. Over 43,000 individuals were registered as sexual offenders in England and Wales as of 31 March 2013.

The reason for the considerable increase, according to the Ministry of Justice, is that more people are being sentenced for sexual offences. The average custodial sentence length is also increasing.

Many sexual offenders are required to register for long periods of time, with some registering for life. This has a cumulative effect on the total number of offenders required to register at any one time.

Again, those who are registered as sexual offenders, and whom are almost entirely male, are just the tip. The number of actual sexual offenders within the UK is much higher as many victims do not report and those who do are not believed. The rape conviction rate in England and Wales is appalling. Between 65 000 – 95 000 people, mostly women, are estimated to be raped each year. Approximately 1 170 rapists are convicted. The vast majority of sexual offenders will never be registered.

This is the largest increase since records began. A total of 55,812 sexual offences were recorded across England and Wales in the year ending June 2013. Within this, the number of offences of rape increased by 9%. According to the ONS, there is evidence to suggest that as a consequence of the Jimmy Savile inquiry.

The rise in reported cases is not “due to Jimmy Savile”. It is a consequence of the public investigations into the allegations against Jimmy Savile, many of which were made during his lifetime and his victims ignored or labelled liars. However, whilst we can assume that the increase is due to more victims reporting their experiences, it is also possible that sexual offences are themselves increasing.

The reality of sexual violence in the UK is that it is far more common than most people believe and the media actually reports. It is almost entirely perpetrated by men against the bodies of women, children and other men. If we want to stop sexual violence, we need to start naming the perpetrators, challenging rape myths and holding the media accountable for both minimising and sensationalising sexual violence for profit. Publishing these 5 Facts does not help the women and children that the Mirror has distressed with their poor coverage of rape trials. If the Mirror truly wants to help, they need to stop publishing rape myths.

The knowledge that lap dancing clubs lead to an increase in sexual violence is hardly a surprise to anyone whose actually bothered to read any of the research into the links between increased sexual violence and the sex industry. This, however, is the first time I’ve heard a senior police officer discuss lap dancing clubs in such terms. Inspector Ian Drummond-Smith, the police chief in the “resort” of Newquay wrote an official letter objecting to the town council licensing a lap dancing club. Drummond-Smith claimed that the lap dancing clubs had already “contributed” to 14 rapes and 34 other sexual assaults in the area within the last two years. Okay, I’m not entirely comfortable with this bit:

“It is of concern that sexual entertainment would take place in such proximity to dwellings and vulnerable persons, and those leaving the premises, having been subject to highly sexualised performances, may be at greater risk of committing sexual offences. The combination of factors above, in particular the vulnerable groups identified, have contributed to the sex crimes.”

Since, it seems to imply that men who commit sexual offences after participating in the objectification and abuse of women in lap dancing clubs are “vulnerable”; as if men are so controlled by their penises that they can’t help but rape women after hanging out in a lap dancing club. That pisses me off. Women are vulnerable because of the increase in sexual violence. Men are at an increased risk of committing a criminal offence; that does not make them vulnerable.

But, I am pleased to hear a senior police officer making the national press whilst arguing against the provision of lap dancing clubs and I am incredibly grateful to the campaigners at Object who fought to have lap dancing clubs rezoned as “sex entertainment venues” (in England and Wales) so that the general public has an opportunity to campaign against their existence. I hope the Scottish government has the gumption to do the same.